WEEKLY WTF
10-21-24 Edition
The Moon
The moon over Santa Clara,
as if emerging from smoke.
A yappy dogs barking.
The traffic has spoke.
The Moon IN Santa Clara,
my Daughter I mean.
In her hospital bed,
the floors not so clean.
The moon from my trailer,
a cosmic street light.
Every time I’m away,
is a lonely ass night.
The moon in my chest,
my cratered heart.
It stops beating nightly-
at dawn it will start.
An illuminated night,
I’ll endure it for sure.
The sun will come up,
then the Moon- that’s her.
Our Moon seethes gravity,
get close and you’ll crash.
Your telescope of scrutiny,
just throw in the trash.
Grasp at the Moon,
and oceans will heave.
Look at her blue eyes,
and you will believe.
The Moon gazes harshly,
at palm trees below.
It you stare at the Moon,
She’ll tell you to go.
The Moon is the Moon,
with pocks and scars.
Some from a meteor,
one from a car.
My lunar cycle:
every other night.
The Moon knows to heal,
the Moon tries to fight.
The Moon in the sky,
round’ the earth- a swirl.
The Moon in my heart,
my Daughter, my girl.
Both Moons light my sky,
both Moons are real.
One Moon just floats,
one Moon must heal.
Though she’s the Moon,
orbit I must.
To the Moon I shall go,
to the Moon or bust.
Stars all combust,
planets all float.
Like orbiting meteors,
these words that I wrote.
The earth had an impact,
creating the moon.
Our Maisie shall heal,
and reclaim herself soon.
However you roll,
at whatever ellipse.
Drink fucking deeply,
of life- take your sips.
Wherever you go,
you’ll be right there.
Whatever you do
I’m here & I care.
A planet a Sun,
a Moon and a sky.
We keep going round,
I don’t know why.
I’m happy to be here
our own Milky Way.
I’m glad I’m your Dad,
is what I’m trying to say.
Area 51
This is the desert solitude in which Kristen and I were camped on August 29th- 509 miles away from our Daughter Maisie Mae when she broke her spine and became a quadriplegic.
Maisie was at college, Chico state- colloquially pronounced with a sleepy grin and half lided eyes “Chiiiiiiccooo” Yep, it’s kind of a party school. I never went to college so Maisie was following solely in her Moms steps, wifey poo is a Chico, sorry a “Chiiiiiccoooo” alumni from back in the day. I won’t say how far back in the day. It was Maisie’s very 1st week as a freshman. An excited and eager bird who finally jumped from her small town nest, only to break her wings-during week fucking one.
Fuck.
We were boondocking here, in the most remote and storied area we had ever been. The Tikaboo valley in SE Nevada. I invite you to gaze into the depths of this photo, just past the jagged blue jaw of that distant mountain range and drop your imagination into the golden dusk under which lies the infamous Groom Lake facility, a place also known as Area 51.
*Que warbley sci-fi music*
Would you believe that while we were there we actually drove right up to the back gate of the legendary base? We certainly fucking did. Even saw the infamous “Camo dudes” posted up on a bluff in their unmarked white truck. Even more difficult to swallow is the fact that I caught footage of something unexplainable in the sky directly over the base. Something that, at any other time, I would have immediately posted about. It could have ended up being one of the most interesting things I’ve ever shared. A possible UFO… which of course has been re-branded now and is referred to as a UAP. That’s what it was, tentatively, for sure, maybe it was. Whatever the fuck it was, it was weird.
And I forgot all about it.
Because, of course I did.
It happened to another version of me an entire lifetime ago.
I still can’t even be bothered to do anything with it. Maybe someday I will but for now, I’ve got much more precious fish to fry.
Maisie was a passenger in a vehicular roll over just after sunset on August 29th. At that very moment, 509 miles away, Kristen & I were sitting here, by our desert campfire watching the flames lick at the cooling desert air whilst the shadows deepened from grey to black and the sky slowly became inundated by the dying suns radiant orange death glow.
Our campsite was so remote that never once in our 3 days did we see a single person or have a single bar of service. In fact, for about a hundred miles before reaching our little desert sanctuary, we never even saw a fence or a power line. There is basically nothing out there other than a single slim road dwarfed by an immense nothingness peppered with the occasional sign warning of low flying aircraft. Oh and the occasional cow who will walk out into the road directly in front of you in bold defiance. That’s what happens when there are no fences to constrain, cows get bold. You can extrapolate that theory further if you like but that is tangential to this tale.
During that dimming demarcation between day and night and, unbeknownst to us, between our old life and our new, we sat in the cooling Nevada desert both ignorant and content in the pregnant dusk watching the bats swoop and flirt with the sparks of our fire whilst meanwhile- Maisie was laying face down screaming and paralyzed half in and half out of an overturned car.
5 kids were in that car. The one driving was drunk and only 1 person had time to get a seatbelt on within the accelerating old Volvo that went sliding sideways on a tight curve hitting a boulder broadside then flipping over onto its back where it settled like a steaming metal turtle.
Maisie was on the bottom of the pile of bodies, all of which scurried out unharmed, all but her. Somehow only Maisie was hurt. That eats at me sometimes. It fucking eats at me. It can’t be helped. I am glad the tragedy did not become a full house but turning that single card of carnage over and over again in my mind is a very difficult thing. The fateful flip of that card ruined our poker paradigm faces and changed all of our lives instantaneously. I’ve since stopped flipping.
Mostly.
Too many mental paper cuts
I remember the day before Maisie Mae’s accident wifey poo said to me: “I don’t like this, being so out of touch way out here, what if something happened to Maisie?”
I told her not to worry, I told her that she’s fine she’s at college nothing bad would ever happen to Maisie. “But”, I conceded, “next time we’ll get that starlink thing or some such in order to stay in touch so that you don’t have to worry about it.”
That fucked up & fateful night Kristen went to bed a bit early, only to awaken restlessly around midnight unable to sleep again for a long while for no discernible reason. About that same midnight hour, in a different state, Maisie was getting her cracked and broken vertebra packed with cadaver bone and bolted back in place with a plate and 10 screws, oh so many miles away.
We both had a bit of a heat on that night and I felt motivated to put my headlamp on and clean up camp after Kristen went to bed in order to expedite our departure in the morning. 3 desolate and delightful days, no signal, no service. In a way, a terrible way, it is fortunate we did not have a signal because had we heard of our Daughter’s demise that very night we would have absofuckinglutely and foolishly taken off to frantically head her way, obviously in no condition to be doing such a thing. What parent would not consider it though, if not do the same? I can’t imagine pacing in the dark all night seething and frothing like a pit bull waiting for a buzz to wear off. It is a small and sad blessing we didn’t find out in real time.
After straightening up camp I wandered out through the dark sentinel like Joshua trees to marinate in the black soup of the deep night and stare at the sky a bit before going horizontal. The curdled Milky Way stared back with its vast and terrible indifference. An indifference whose alchemy transforms your reflected smallness into a humbled intimacy of sorts.
I was surprised to hear a strange and unfamiliar cluck and then a blubber. My eyeballs were sweating. Why, what’s this!? Holy shit I’m crying, wtf!? Sadly I had hitherto only cried the one time as an adult and it was over a dog. Why the fuck am I crying in the middle of a desert for no reason whatsoever? I can’t say it was the download of enormity that sometimes happens to me when I stare into the eternal cosmic clockworks, I had felt that the night before but this night I felt kind of neutral or perhaps even numb, and yet I cried a little. I can’t exactly remember if I was thinking about Maisie at that moment or not. It seems like… well I just can’t remember for sure so I won’t say, but it was an unusual and noteworthy thing at the time and I thought it something worthy of telling Kristen about in the morning.
I never did though, I forgot. My mind was about finishing breaking camp and getting the trailer hooked up after which I became fully engaged in the slow careful and crunching crawl out of the desert with our leaning and creaking and bobbing camper following obediently behind us.
Around 9am we emerged from the moderate sea of sandy swells and birthed, like a shiny metal sea lion and its white aluminum afterbirth, onto the long black ribbon of highway which stretched into the consuming blur of heat on the horizon. We headed East through the primordial desert towards Zion. No particular destination in mind, just winging it, as one does. As we often do… or did.
We cruised along the Extraterrestrial highway towards Crystal Springs and as we got closer to the alien themed outpost we finally got a couple bars and Kristen’s phone began blowing up. She half read a text about Maisie… something about an accident… hopefully we had heard… hopefully we were already at the hospital... My heart did a terrible little dance behind my ribs and my pulse started pounding out a manic rhythm of dread in my temples. The deep diesel roar of my truck’s engine seemed to go quiet as it was overwritten by a mounting scream of tinnitus. The world around me seemed to slow to a crawl. We immediately called Maisie’s phone but she didn’t answer, instead, an ICU nurse did. She said, “you need to pull over right now.”
Fuck.
Have you ever felt your spirit leave your body and yet simultaneously be in your body peering through blurry wet eyes into a now unfamiliar world turned hellscape? Finger tips going numb, cannot seem to catch your breath, reality swoons threatening nausea? Separate from yet somehow trapped within this warm body whose blood has turned to terrified ice?
There was literally no where safe to pull over so I said: “Just tell us”.
And so she did.
We continued to Crystal Springs to try to get more bars on our phone and pulled over next to the big metal alien in front of an old quonset hut to await a call back from the Neuro surgeons assistant.
I remember saying to him, “ok wait, wait, you’re telling us our Daughter will never fucking walk again? Is that what you’re telling us!?”
That’s what he was telling us.
While that drive to the ICU in Chico was the longest 10 hours of our life, in retrospect, it was also the shortest. What I mean is that when you are in such an extreme state of suffering, it is a thing so outside of normal experience that it’s a wholly foreign and, dare I say, alien thing. So alien that it can’t even be fully remembered in a normal conscious state.
I have broken memories of the almost unbearable eternity of driving. I remember yelling, I remember balling, I remember cussing and pounding the steering wheel so hard that I thought it might break off. I remember screaming until my throat could no longer produce sound and finally succumbed into numb heaving silent choked sobs. I remember I could barely see through my own eyes.
I had finally remembered how to cry.
I kept trying to wake up. I felt certain that this had to be a fucking nightmare and I sought the glorious relief of waking up in bed, a sliver of sun caressing my face, and realizing with relief- everything’s fine, it was just a dream after all.
I never did wake up. Sometimes, even now, I still try.
I dimly remember frantic discussions about trying to find a flight (in the middle of fucking nowhere with no cell coverage) and then an idea to dump and abandon the trailer in the desert to get more speed. But in truth the trailer may have saved our lives. Our 21’ GeoPro acted as a gravity drogue behind us forcing me to navigate curves more carefully and to downshift on steep grades and so forth. That being said I can say this: that fucking trailer did go airborne more than once, tires actually leaving the pavement numerous times violently bouncing behind the truck as our bodies heaved back and forth against our seatbelts with the force of the bouncing.
I did not give a single fuck.
A great deal of our driving was without any cell service. We thought… terrible thoughts. “What if’s” that a parent should not ever have to think about. Like: What if a complication arises and we don’t make it in time to be there for our little girl if she dies? Long stretches of service-less desert with no bars and no word, wondering if the next time we heard something it would be the thing that would break any parents heart. Horrible thoughts- like that. And worse.
Much worse.
At such times- the mind rebels, catastrophising as a sort of preparation tactic for the worst.
Amidst the tears and screams and cussing I felt something in me snap. The snap was a fateful twang that seemed like a severing of the vast array of tethers connected to everything I previously thought I gave a shit about. A lifting of so many weights I did not know that I even held, the sudden absence of which propelled my intent upon greased rails of parental purpose.
I became single pointed. Like a fisherman- my psyche culled all the unimportant little flopping desire fish and tossed them back into the unmanifest ocean. I had spotted my white whale and I began my relentless chase, one that continues even now whilst the ship that is my meat shudders and groans. I felt my life finally had a clear and definitive direction- the direction was to do whatever the fuck needed doing for my North Star, my little girl.
That was just the first half hour of our drive. Only 9.5 more fucking hours of devastated driving to go…
Maisie was completely conscious during and after her accident and remembered our cell numbers, which of course went unanswered, and thankfully the home landline. We never answer the landline but she had the wherewithal to tell the ER nurses to call it relentlessly and that her Brother, our Son Shamus, would eventually answer.
Shamus has always refused to be on any of my social media shit- he’s smart like that. That’s why you never see or even hear mention of him, I respect his stance. He absolutely would not like me talking about him on social media whatsoever- even now. But his incredible and selfless actions deserve recognition whether he fucking likes it or not. Sorry/ not sorry M’Boy.
Shamus likes to keep to himself. He’s avoids talking to actual humans on the phone. He’s 21, and it’s a generational thing- if you know, you know. But when the ICU call came he eventually answered and immediately mobilized- arriving at the hospital around 3am. I cannot imagine what was going through his head, I can barely even remember my own 10 hour tour through hell, but Shamus is strangely calm in frantic situations. After Maisie’s 6 hour surgery, blessedly, Shamus was there upon her awakening. An awakening that happened while we were still fitfully tossing and turning, asleep far away in the desert.
I shouldn’t say any more about his heroic actions, but fuck it… I’m gonna.
After we got word about the accident we immediately headed West and eventually arrived at a small outpost called the Little Ale-in. It’s the last place to get gas for like a hundred miles or some shit.
I had filled our tank from the wonky above ground deisel tank out back and had gone into the trailer for a quick sobbing piss. Kristen was standing within the open passenger side door of the truck, bent over, head down on the seat balling her heart out when she heard the crunch of car tires and the slight squeal of brakes behind her. “Ma’am are you ok?” It was a Nevada highway patrol car. Kristen said “no, no I’m not. My Daughter was in a terrible accident.” The highway patrolman replied “I’m very sorry to hear that” and he asked:
“are you the Bolands?”
Kristen stuttered, “yes”.
The officer replied
“I was sent out here to find you.”
Shamus fucking did that. He studied my vague insta and FB posts and guesstimated our location and made calls and mobilized resources. I could say much more about all the ways he stepped up and was heroically there for his little sister while we were racing West, but he’d hate that too and l’ve probably said too much as it is.
This is just the smallest slice of this story. There are so many bizarre and extraordinary synchronicities that happened shortly before her injury and that persist even now. So many illuminations and epiphanies, odd lights ablaze in this night of extreme darkness.
I just can’t. Not here and not right now. There’s too much of it and also, at least for now, it’s too much, you know?
Perhaps I’ll take the advice of many of you and write it all down. Finally put out a book of some sort. Break the seal as it were. So many of you have become invested in our girl- both emotionally on line and literally in her gofundme, and myriad other ways in real life, I felt like I should start telling this horrific yet inspiring tale. A tale that has just begun.
But whatever happens, it’s gonna be a minute.
Like I mentioned previously, I have more precious fish to fry currently. But we do have this, right here and right now. Thank you dear reader for reading for without you I’d probably never actually be bothered to write.
Thank you for all the kind words and healing thoughts and prayers and all the continued support for our girl, all of “our girl”. See you in the Weekly WTF, or back here, or not. I’m still not the fucking boss of you. Toodaloo.
A Benefit for Maisie
Dedicated to Miracle Maisie Mae
Toodaloo
